Amazon EC2 leaves beta, adds Windows; Rackspace joins cloud

Now out of beta, Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service is ready for production …

Amazon's EC2 service yesterday went into full production mode. The cloud computing platform shed its beta label and, in so doing, gained a service level agreement. These changes mark EC2's transition from an experimental development platform into an enterprise-ready cloud solution, broadening EC2's reach to include those customers who might have otherwise been attracted to AT&T's Synaptic Hosting.

Reliability is one of the major concerns regarding the viability of cloud computing; performing business-critical activities in a remote data center may well be an unacceptable risk for many businesses. EC2's SLA promises 99.95 percent availability (this translates to a little over 4 hours of downtime per year). Coupled with S3's 99.9 percent availability promise, these services should now be an option for a much broader audience.

Amazon also announced a public beta of the availability of Windows and SQL Server on EC2. First announced earlier this month, the company is expecting customers to use Windows EC2 for a range of activities, from running ASP.NET web applications to media transcoding to High Performance Computing. Not surprisingly, Windows EC2 will cost more than the operating systems available (Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenSolaris) but, with the scalability and flexibility EC2 offers, it could become a highly compelling hosting platform.

The company also described features planned for next year, including improved management and monitoring of cloud applications and automatic load balancing and scaling. These will allow applications on EC2 to both distribute load between EC2 instances and dynamically alter the capacity of the application's EC2 instances to accommodate changes in demand. This kind of capability truly justifies the use of cloud computing, as it provides cheap and easy scaling in a way not possible with conventional hosting.

Rackspace

With cloud services encroaching on the traditional hosting market, Rackspace is trying to get in on the action. One of the world's largest hosting providers, Rackspace has announced the acquisition of JungleDisk and SliceHost, which are cloud backup and compute services, respectively.

With these acquisitions, Rackspace is expanding its cloud offerings to provide a service range comparable to Amazon's. The company already has cloud web hosting and storage services; with the purchase of SliceHost, it will develop a general-purpose cloud computing product named Cloud Server. Perhaps surprisingly, JungleDisk is currently built on Amazon's S3 storage, though Rackspace plans to offer support for its own storage back-end too. These will all sell under its Mosso brand.

Rackspace has a huge user base and a wealth of experience in the traditional hosting world. With these acquisitions and forthcoming products, it will be competing head-on with S3 and EC2. If Rackspace can bring its customers and expertise to its cloud platform, it could provide stiff competition for Amazon's services in this growth market.

Ultimately, Rackspace probably has more to lose than Amazon in this battle. For many applications, cloud hosting (whether using EC2 or Cloud Server) will undercut traditional hosting while providing greater scalability and robustness, and this is bad news for a company whose bread and butter is pricey server hosting.